Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work | Hacker News Reader

Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

qz.com

186 pointscribbles122 comments

> “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.”

So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

Pretty much.

I fit into this category and my anecdotal experience tells me that hiring managers favor contractors for that reason as well as the fact that the money to pay them sometimes is listed as a different line-item on the budget. I think the combination of the two helps as well - when looking at a large contractor line-item, knowing that it can be scaled back with less headache than a Full Time Employee (FTE) makes it easier to stomach I think.

If you're comfortable with hustling for work when the time comes, then contracting can be a much better arrangement. I work from home, basically whenever I want, and I make more money than I would as a FTE (even when factoring in the outrageous cost of health insurance these days).

The biggest thing I think is the mental shift. As a FTE, there's a stronger sense of job security. But really, layoffs happen all the time and as a FTE I feel like I'd be less prepared to find another job, whereas being a contractor means I have to constantly be thinking about the future.

Pick your poison I guess.

Its not well paid IT contractors its all the minimum wage disguised employment "gig" jobs that is where the growth is.

You don't want your gig job? Man you have to HUSTLE. You have to have the ENERGY. You have to want to be SUCCESSFUL more then you want to SLEEP. Bill Gates HUSTLED. Steve Jobs HUSTLED. Kobe Bryant HUSTLED. If you aren't successful its YOUR fault.

* Sponsored by corporate *

Yeah, and these gigs aren't the best thing around for sure. But I wonder where people would be without them, you know? Would it be huge unemployment? Or would conventional employees be the result?

They would probably be unemployed. Now we have people who are barely employed. They are paid just enough to keep them from banding together and demanding change. If they were unemployed then they'd have a lot more incentive to do something. Now they are trapped trying to keep their heads above water.

Don't think this isn't on purpose. Every last dime is getting squeezed out.

Incompetence is just as plausible as conspiracy.

What incompetence? It's working out just fine for the employers.

Most people want to help "the people" but differ on definitions of who the people are and what is best for them.

Really depends. If you think about uber then without uber or similar services then people would use taxis. The taxi drivers would get paid more due to having monopolies in most cities and fares would be outrageous.

Most of the gig type companies are able to offer lower prices to consumers at the expense of workers.

Also important to note is that uber and lyft sell their gigs as just side income, not a full time job so I think people have been fair warned that uber is not sufficient to support yourself.

I think there is a huge portion of trips taken with Lyft/Uber that would not be taken at all with a taxi. I would never take a taxi except in the most dire circumstances due to my experience of them being dirty and smoke smelling and questionable drivers, but with Uber/Lyft, I use them all the time now instead of asking family or friends for drop off/pickup at airport, or getting around the city, etc.

Uber is banned where I live, and the taxis are a reasonable price.

When I went home to the UK at Christmas, Uber wanted to charge around 3 times the price of the monopolistic black cabs.

The taxi drivers would get paid more due to having monopolies in most cities and fares would be outrageous.

Uhh... Uber is, like, 5-6 years old in most locales, less in many. This isn't some alternative universe we have to imagine. We just have to think back to before 2010... you know, the before time. The long long ago.

And back then, taxi rates were hardly "outrageous". Hell, even today, Uber isn't necessarily that much cheaper in a lot of places.

In sparsely populated areas, taxis are sometimes even cheaper. In cities, though, it's not even a contest. Ride-sharing is 2x to 3x cheaper than a taxi in my limited dataset.

Usually high taxi fares don't go to the drivers, they go to the owners of the licenses. I think a NYC medallion used to cost $1.3 million before Uber; I don't think most of the drivers were shelling that out.

Not all countries have the corrupt medallion system

Yes and guess who subsides those peoples benefits - I don't mind subsidizing nurse or dr training but a taxi company no way

well one Uber driver interviewed in the UK used to own his own private hire firm he's seen a huge drop

Your account was created 1111 days ago.

Exactly why we need universal healthcare in the US

It’s something every worker should be fighting tooth and nail for

It would go a long way to breaking up the neoliberal corporate hegemony

Sadly, and regardless of education and political leanings, Americans seem in love with a fictional account of the countries history. That it was all great 50 yrs ago without universal healthcare (when they were kids and not really paying attention) so of course it’s just fine to keep it that way.

I encounter people of all ages and backgrounds with that notion kicking about, every day. Having lived and traveled the world, Americans are unique in their ignorance that the world was just as corrupt a generation ago.

Now let’s go watch some TVLand and chill

We need more than universal healthcare; we need straight-up universal care. The idea should be that periods of unemployment or uncertainty are not terrifying gray areas for an average person. If people felt comfortable that they would have support for finding better pastures from a shitty job, they'd be more likely to seek them. If they felt more confident that they had prospects after a layoff, they'd be more likely to look for alternate employment instead of sitting around in an abandoned factory town as it rots to the ground around them.

I think it comes down to the fact that risk-taking cannot be a luxury, if we want the United States to remain a competitive and dynamic society. "Party of jobs?" How about a party for workers?

After all, as many conservatives will happily tell you, true value comes from the heads, the hearts, and the hands of individuals. Why are we giving so much free stuff to Big Jobernment?

> How about a party for workers?

Possible principles for a workers party:

- maximize after-rent and after-tax disposable income of workers

- shift all taxes off of wages from labor and onto ground rent from private enclosures of land and natural resources

- support a universal public savings account for all citizen residents over 20

- democratically divide and deposit all surplus natural resource rents directly into the universal savings accounts

- have the Federal Reserve conduct monetary policy by setting the interest rate on the universal citizen savings accounts, rather than by buying up assets from investors

This should increase the disposable income for a super-majority of workers by decreasing rent, making acquiring a house more affordable, making land for new small farms and businesses near competitive markets easier to obtain, increasing private savings to ensure workers have access to a large-runway of cash and high bargaining power while in between jobs, reducing the severity of economic depressions and recessions created by idle land speculation, and by directing capital flows away from mortgages and mortgage-backed assets and into productive businesses which will actually increase the demand for labor and raise wages.

>- support a universal public savings account for all citizen residents over 20

Thiss could not possibly be more wrong. Experience has shown that if a "public savings account" can be raided by its controllers to support some more powerful constituency (shareholders, current voters and taxpayers, etc.) it will. We've seen with this corporate pensions, state government pensions, and Social Security. A workers' party would immediately and forcefully end all "public savings account" schemes which are really wealth transfers away from workers in disguise, and (at most) force workers to save in accounts for which they are the custodians.

- Seize the means of production

wait no, you aren't suggesting communism.

I don't think switching to a property tax system is the way to go. Wouldn't it end up hurting people as you just see rents rise?

I am advocating a land value tax, not a property tax. This is the most progressive tax possible as the incidence of the tax does not fall upon labor at all.

> Wouldn't it end up hurting people as you just see rents rise?

No, rents would not rise in proportion to the tax. Adding a tax as a carrying cost on a good of fixed supply such as land produces the opposite effect of a tax of goods and services. It increases the supply of available land and decreases prices because the tax makes land less attractive as a speculative investment and store of wealth. It encourages land holders to sell off any underutilized land being held for speculative purposes, thus increasing the supply of land available for actual use and improvement by workers, and lowering its price.

The 'ground rent' collected by landholders is the surplus profit above what is necessary to bring the land into use. If no one paid ground rent to private landholders, the supply of land would still remain the same, and there would still be just as much land available for everyone to use. Confiscating private ground rent simply shifts this payment from private parties to the state, and the tax cannot be passed on to renters through higher prices at all.

This increases the disposable income of a super-majority, because once all private ground is instead paid to the government for the provision of essential goods and services, all other taxes which fall upon the labor of workers, such as payroll and consumption taxes, can be eliminated.

So I buy some land. I plop an apartment building down on it. I pay "land tax" on the land.

Why would I not just raise rents to preserve my profits?

You will still be competing against everyone else who does the same, and your competition will be vastly increased. It will no longer be profitable for other nearby land holders to hold on to idle, vacant, or under-utilized land. For instance, if someone is holding on to a vacant building, a parking lot, or low density commercial development such as a strip mall, it may no longer be profitable to hold on to these under a land value tax.

The vacant building may be replaced with several small town houses, the low density commercial buildings may be replaced with multi-story mixed used buildings with additional housing built-in, as property owners seek to increase the value of their buildings relative to surrounding buildings in order to acquire a profit larger than the land value tax. They would pay the same tax regardless of whether they left the land vacant or put it to use, so there is a strong incentive for them to put it to the best use possible.

When land is actually improved and put to use, this increases the demand for labor and raises wages so that wages increase faster than rent. When land is held idle for speculative purposes, rent increases faster than wages and the average worker becomes poorer even if the output of the economy is increasing. Nominal prices may change in reaction to market condition, but what is important is wages relative to rent.

Communism is anti-worker because it leads to rampant rent-seeking by political organizers responsible for coordinating the provision of collectively owned capital goods, which is a necessarily a complex problem, since a capital good could refer to any manufactured good which is 'durable' and not immediately consumed.

However the base means of production for any economy as recognized by the Physiocrats and all classical economists is land and natural resources, which are non-produced resources of fixed supply that are a wholly distinct factor of production than capital.

While it is not necessary or desirable for the state to seize capital or private interest payments paid for the use of capital, it should sieze the 'ground rent' which is acquired from private enclosures of natural resources, as unlike interest on capital the surplus ground rent paid to landholders does nothing to increase the supply of land, and is collected even if the land were to remain idle and the landholder invested nothing in its actual improvement.

>Communism is anti-worker because it leads to rampant rent-seeking by political organizers responsible for coordinating the provision of collectively owned capital goods

Can you expand on what you mean by this, please? If I understand it correctly, you're saying that organisers of the means of production would draw benefit which is not distributed to the collective of people who "own" the means of production. How would they do this?

I think it is important also to note that capital requires circulation, as in M-C-M', which not only requires money but also the value-form - these two things are what the Communists desire to render useless through the collective control of means of production.

There are strong currents in Communism which are anti-bureaucracy, and insist on models which do not place the economic organisers of a lower-stage Communist society to be above others in terms of access to goods. As I understand it, within Communist society a line is drawn between end goods and goods which will be used for further production.

What is the justification for separating natural resources from other forms of capital? They require labour to extract, transport and refine so in my view they are as much capital as outputs from previous industrial processes.

It's an issue of central planning and information arbitrage I guess. Unless the entire society is equally involved in economic central planning (which is absurd), a small group of people will be doing it, thus having access to more information, which is power.

Which is not to say that is not a problem in capitalist society or something that strong democratic foundations cannot alleviate.

Of course not everyone can be directly involved with the allocation of resources, however as with all scarce resources decisions need to be made from time to time on which usage would best benefit society; in this case, I'm an advocate for democratic management of such resources. I don't think that power only comes with information, the power comes when people are given extra abilities to deal with that information (such as using personal preference to dictate allocation) so I think that protections are needed.

I think the problem with central planning stretches further; the goal of the Communists is to avoid alienation from one's labour, the non-commodity of labour-power, however having labour being externally imposed (whether by the capitalist and the "market" within capitalist society, or by the central planner within Socialist society) is alienation by definition. Therefore some change in the method of planning is required. Marx wrote that there are four forms of alienation, one which I think is important here is alienation of the worker from the act of production; the Communist movement aims to reject this alienation through making the whole productive capacity of society available to all such that the worker can in almost all cases direct his own labour, all production is social therefore, as all workers contribute.

So the kind of planning in higher stage Communism is much past the idea of a government planning, rather, as Marx wrote (to what some consider a contradiction), society regulates general production. To quote,

>For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Sure, Marx was smart and all, but practically, what it comes down to, is a few options.

- Capitalist markets

- USSR style central planning

- Anarchist-leaning gift economy, not scaleable beyond n=1000 or so

- Market socialism strains like mutualism or ParEcon, both of which have major issues of their own

- Any mix of the above, e.g. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", which has been the best economic performer of the last 30 years or so.

In other words, at some point you need to come down from pie in the sky Marx quotes and make physical implementations, which is always more difficult than theory.

So if central planning is problematic, what do you choose then?

We need guaranteed minimum income, its the most freedom enhancing way of solving these problems. Give people cash, give them financial literacy training, the rest ought to work out okay.

This solution also sidesteps the atrocious incentives of unemployment payouts.

You might be making more from unemployment than by working a min wage job so why take it?

Most states do not require you to take the first job that comes along - you are only required to take that if you have tried and cannot otherwise find work

Let's put it as fighting for the abolition of wage slavery.

> Americans seem in love with a fictional account of the countries history.

This shouldn't be about historical narratives or ideology, that's largely why public health insurance is dead-on-arrival in US politics. Both sides are terribly ideological about it and unrealistic as a result.

The healthcare industry is already the most heavily regulated of all industries in the US. Saying it's been held back from government intervention is equally a myth as the US modern history as a free-market friendly place is a myth.

This debate should be about whether certain market niches make the more sense as public entities. NOT as an example of "free markets" failing as a general rule and trying to sell the idea "you just need to accept that government knows best" (I'm paraphrasing).

Rather it should be sold as an exception to the rule. The simple fact is government should not be in the vast majority of industry. But healthcare (specifically health insurance) has many unique and perverse incentives making it poorly suited for markets and the public alternative offers plenty of benefits to a society, including a capitalist society. Healthy workers are good workers, small business is less burdened with expensive healthcare packages, the morality of treating a seriously sick person who can't work then billing their family $10k, etc, etc.

I believe there is still a good argument to be made in favour of public health insurance without alienating those who put their trust in markets. It's a unique exception and is already far from operating as a free market in the US. So why not bite the bullet and entirely subsidize it for everyone? That is a much smaller ask than the typical democrat "corporations are evil" pitch on this matter.

Messaging is important.

> Rather it should be sold as an exception to the rule.

I've said this before: Society has already made it's choice. Society doesn't want people dying in the streets. Once you've made that decision, universal healthcare in some form or another just flows from that. The US has a form of it right now, it's just extremely perverse and expensive.

Water, food, clothing, and shelter are all more important to people not dying in the streets than health care, and we don't have government single-payer versions of any of those.

So I agree with the parent: it's not enough to just say that health care is important, therefore it should be single payer. There are too many counter examples for such a simple argument to pass muster. Discussions of health care policy need to start with a detailed and honest accouting of the health care market specifically.

> Water, food, clothing, and shelter are all more important to people not dying in the streets than health care

And nearly all governments provide countless services from welfare, public housing, shelters, the foster care system, food stamps, etc for that as well.

Society has already made the decision about socialized healthcare; the only real question is how to implement it. The current implementation where you have socialized healthcare but deny it's existence is the worst possible and least efficient system.

Wouldn't universal health care and public health insurance be completely different things? The primary issue with "insurance" as I see it is that it separates where the cost is generated from who pays it. This removes the responsibility and incentive to keep costs low. I'd hope if we had a universal health care system this would not be the case.

I don't think the average person would understand those distinctions off-hand.

The features of 'basic care' that I think everyone should have:

    * Everyone has it
    * It's only paid for by taxes
    * There are still systems in place for keeping costs low.
    * MOST doctors in the area should be options for care, assuming they're open.
    * /bad/ doctors (those who don't produce good results) shouldn't get to stay doctors.
    * The malpractice part of the equation is covered by a combination of
    * * social disability (care for the victim) and
    * * criminal justice (doctor is guilty of malpractice).

For cost controls:

    * Government care/doctors (military docs) should be possible.
    * Mass bulk procurement / manufacture of basic supplies.
    * No more billing, lawyers fighting for/against costs, etc.
    * Some kind of auction bid for the services of doctors performing classes of common work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

I thought this was called a Dutch Auction, but it seems that what I'm thinking of is some kind of combination of second-price and other types of auction. In this case the buyer of services (the government) wants to buy a projection of X units within a given geographic region and wants the option of exceeding that by a factor of Y.

X units would set the minimum cost paid out (doctors would be paid for the minimum work they're expected to do irrespective of need), but more work might be required. Disaster rates would be a third category of bid.

The way that the cost for a procedure would be set would look something like this.

    * Geographic regions are defined.
    * Doctors/Clinics within all regions report their current and potential capacity
    * *as well as the rate they would prefer to charge for known services.
    * Expected rates of need for regions are calculated.

Based on the above three points, the least expensive but still qualified bids are the winners, with the most expensive winning offer setting the price rates for that region, which all winners receive.

If there is major discrepancy in price between areas, investigation of collusion and/or re-locating those who can to other areas for some procedures could be determined.

Yes, because corporate & state hegemony is so much less in countries with universal healthcare /s

Universal healthcare is a good thing, but it won't really change things in that way.

Government should have its own infra and hire medical professionals. They should leave the private sector alone.

We have that now, it's called the Veteran's Association (VA). It's kind of a mess.

Out of curiosity I looked up and found that the estimated VA budget (in 2014) for "Hospital and Medical Care" was $55.4 billion. This covered ~22m Vets at the time. So a rough estimate for a national equivalent of VA care would be $800B/yr or maybe $850B-1T in todays dollars.

> Exactly why we need universal healthcare in the US

I agree but the political will to do it is just not there. Not yet, anyway.

> It would go a long way to breaking up the neoliberal corporate hegemony

No, it wouldn't. Neoliberal corporate hegemony rules all of the developed world, all of which, except the US, has universal healthcare.

neoliberal corporate hegemony?

You need to define what you mean with universal and what you mean with healthcare. Does it mean ex that you can't have private insurance and private hospitals? What does it cover? Who does it cover (Tourists, illegal immigrants?) and what does it cover?

I have lived in both systems and have experienced pro and cons with both of theem.

What's a worker to do? I live in a blue city in a blue state and vote for the blue people that say they're going to help out with this. They are not the majority and the other party are hell-bent on destroying what little advancements have been made.

Not to mention, it's pretty hard to reshape ideas that have been adopted or bred into the culture over the years. Health care should not be tied to employment but it's been that way for years with a lot of large incentives to keep it that way.

As an unemployed person, it sucks and you're looked down upon as it being your fault instead of a working for a poorly-run company or something else. You're not a victim, you're a perpetrator with a flaw. An undesirable.

That's the beauty of the 'real' Christian society of America - it's all black and white, good and evil. It's God's grace that they have their jobs and some flaw in your that you don't. It's not about luck, or business downturn, etc.

Maybe reply instead of downvoting folks.

Yup. I have been saying this for a couple of years now and which is why I am a firm believer that automation and digitalization are some of the biggest challenges for society although I am a proponent of both.

Has the increasing cost of health insurance motivated employers to start using more contract workers?

Employers have been operating without any sense of social responsibility since long before health care became a part of the national conversation.

You could entirely remove any obligation of providing health insurance from all employers, and they'd still replace payrolled employees with contract workers if it saved them a buck.

If it saved them a cent.

Yes, but they were doing this 10 years ago, so the recent increases in costs are probably only accelerating an existing trend.

Potentially. But now more than ever, companies with little to no revenue growth don't know how to boost earnings aside from cutting costs.

Probably. Do employers pay payroll tax on independent contractors? Those two items together make FTEs really expensive.

There is no requirement to withhold taxes on independent contractors. The independent contractor is fully liable for all payroll obligations. If you are a direct employee then the employer will pay half of your payroll tax (7.5%). If you are an independent contractor then you pay the full tax of 15%.

However, independent contractors are not without risk because the independent contractor is suppose to operate fully independent without your supervision. If you violate certain guidelines then you have to classify the worker as an employee which entitles them to certain rights.

It has allowed them to avoid paying for that part to make business models like Ubers, TaskRabbits etc work.

People talk like this is a bad thing, but I don't get it.

If working for your employer became a negative ROI, you'd quit your job.

If employing somebody becomes a negative ROI, I don't see why it shouldn't be equally easy to stop employing them.

As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, neither party will terminate it.

Most employers can adapt to the loss of a single worker much more easily than a worker can adapt to losing their job. And much of our social safety net currently operates via employers - things like pensions, maternity leave, healthcare, and even unemployment are tightly coupled to the single-long-term-employer model. Maybe they shouldn't be, but fixing that will take time and in the meantime people will slip through the cracks.

We're stuffing people into cracks and making new cracks to stuff them in.

Most people can’t just quit their job, they have monthly recurring bills that must be paid. Those of us that work in tech are quite fortunate to have realistic alternatives. However, even many of us are restricted due to location, and before it’s mentioned, yeah we could move but we have families with children in school and spouses who have non tech careers. Moving is expensive. The employment system in the US, especially in states like mine, ensure that employers have persistent power over employees under the guise of “right to work”.

>The employment system in the US, especially in states like mine, ensure that employers have persistent power over employees under the guise of “right to work”.

I think you mean "at-will employment". All American states have that. "Right to work" laws refer to laws banning union contracts from creating "closed shops".

Yep, I did mean "at-will". Thank you!

It's bad because the overwhelming majority of people don't enjoy the process of finding a new job and cannot afford to spend time finding new work.

I think a lot of the talk is also due to unhappiness with the economic trend that is drawing the median and minimum incomes closer together, which is a reversal of a trend that gave widespread optimism and contentment.

Because of the massive imbalance of power between employer and employee. Which is why employment protection is a lot stronger in every other developed country than the US.

The employee is usually in a much more precarious situation, and usually more concerned with cashflow than ROI.

Workers are usually more efficient when they concentrate on one job full time. But that leaves them exposed to any disruption of that one job.

Also, many employers expect contractors to be always available, or available full time for long stretches, but that makes it impossible to diversify their income.

So it can become very one-sided. A possible answer would be to make it normal for employees to have contracts with several employers at once, but that can create conflicts of interest in a lot of professions, and would make things like IP very messy.

It's a bad thing that the demographics of the US are now such that this has happened... that most employee / employer relationships are no longer mutually beneficial.

Because we don't like looking at people as purely numbers. Especially when those people are dependent upon their job to be able to pay rent and buy food.

That is why the US government itself likes contractors - it allows them to avoid dealing with the Civil Service.

Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts:

""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a forthcoming study, Sarah Shannon, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, and five colleagues estimate that America’s criminal class (people with a felony conviction or prison time in their background) roughly quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 — from 5 million to nearly 20 million. Given the flow of sentencing since then, we might expect that population to have topped 23 million by now. And since roughly two and a half million people are behind bars today, this means that 20 million released felons and ex-prisoners are living outside institutions. This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony. And the ratio for prime-age men could be even higher, given the upsurge of sentencing in recent decades."

http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/10/after-incar...

> This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony.

That's an astounding statistic. I don't live in America, and I obviously don't run into a perfectly uniform sampling of society, but I'd guess way less than 1 in 8 people I meet have done something that deserves being thrown in prison.

Not that many people have done something that deserves being thrown in prison in the US, either. We're just far too happy to throw people in for things that don't deserve it, like non-violent drug offenses.

The other issue is that many companies juts have blanket bans against hiring a 'felon'; doesn't matter if it was murdering a family or stealing a TV

> population to have topped 23 million by now

Assuming an error rate of about 4%, this means that about 900,000 Americans have been wrongly convicted -- about the population of San Francisco.

Do you have a source for your 4% figure or is that just a gut feel estimate? I have no idea (as if anyone can definitively know) what the actual rate might be.

Here is a source: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/28/how-many-...

It's unsurprising considering the increasing costs and regulations imposed upon full time workers.

When you see figures on what workers are paid, the figure should be "total compensation", which includes things like benefits, FICA taxes paid on behalf of the employee, etc. These can easily add 50% to the compensation. Showing just the wage is disingenuous.

Can you give some examples of what these costs are and how they've increased since 2005 (or 1995)?

1. Employer's FICA contribution

2. Vacation paid time off

3. Sick leave paid time off

4. Maternity/Paternity paid time off

5. health care benefits

6. free/subsidized lunch

7. free bus passes

8. 401k employer matching contribution

9. employee stock purchase plans

10. stock options

11. bonuses

12. profit sharing / commissions

13. retirement plan

14. education tuition help

15. random other things like gym memberships, legal help, etc.

Here's some of Boeing's benefits:

http://www.boeing.com/careers/benefits/united-states-benefit...

Some statistics:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm

ROFL, wow, talk about cherry-picking to make a case...

The fact is the US offers the least PTO of any developed nation. Same goes with sick leave and mat/pat leave.

And free lunch? Free bus passes? Stock and option plans, profit sharing, educiation/tuition, retirement, gym memberships... HA!

I know this is shocking, but: most of the world isn't SV. Those benefits are fantasies for the vast majority of American salaried employees.

Many people I know live with 2 weeks of combined PTO, 3 months of maternity leave (mandated by law... ish... there's a bunch of exclusions) and no paternity leave whatsoever, basic health care, and a 401k match if they're lucky.

Now, I'm not claiming that a salaried employee isn't more expensive than a contract employee. That's objectively true. And in a very real sense, the entire point and why this trend is alarming: the more people pushed to underemployement (part-time or contract work), the more people who don't realize those additional benefits, thus contributing to the ongoing demolition of the middle class.

But the US workplace is hideously behind the rest of the western world, and is still managing to lead the way in underemployment as well. After a while you really gotta wonder why that is...

> cherry-picking

The last two links are statistics.

> this isn't SV

You're right, Boeing is not part of Silicon Valley. Government & military employees also, as a rule, get generous benefits.

But that's all beside the point, which is that the cost of those benefits should be added in when comparing salaries.

> which is that the cost of those benefits should be added in when comparing salaries.

If any of my past companies are any indication (outside of La La Land California), most of the additional "benefits" are wiped out by my monthly premium for my health insurance "benefit."

6-15 are not only not mandatory, they are purposely offered by some employers to attract and incentivize employees. Thus, to compare them to government required benefits (1-5) makes no sense. The the high cost of employees is more attributable to the competition for employees by employers, not government required benefits.

Hang on, 6-15 are not only not legally mandated, but also very rare, right? And my understanding is that 2-4 are smaller in the US than other first-world countries.

So we're left with FICA and healthcare. Healthcare being bizarrely expensive.

> but also very rare, right?

See the last two links for statistics.

Besides FICA and Healthcare none of those things are mandated by law. Companies provide them to compete in the labor market.

That's no longer true:

https://fairygodboss.com/career-topics/pregnancy-maternity-l...

http://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/ordinances/paid-sick-a...

Well everyone's health insurance premiums have gone up by quite a bit.

I actually consider this to be good news overall. We do need to keep an eye on structuring things such that gig workers have the ability to grow real careers and have positive experiences (wrt adequate income and quality of life in terms of control over their time etc). We need to make sure these aren't structured in a fuck you way. But, I do gig work and it was a huge saving grace while extremely ill and homeless. It allowed me to develop an income and eventually get off the street.

Except that the go-to solution to every industry problems has been (and continues to be) to regulate it centrally with some agency or shut it down when that doesn't make sense, which in reality only works for a big-company full time salary job oriented economy. Instead of strengthening property laws and other personal liability protections, aka the type of recourses available to contractors, and/or simply offering traditional services and protections to everyone, not just full-time employee or those who meet a byzantine list of special conditions.

Instead of trying to fix these out-of-date legacy systems, a legal and regulatory system designed for a previous generation, everyone seems to want to attack the 'gig economy' and Silicon Valley as some purposefully exploitative entity, as if this is why Uber came into existence. Rather than a natural evolution of the workplace in a high-tech economy.

My favourite are those pushing the idea that unions are the missing piece of the puzzle in 2017.

Instead of understanding the history of labor force exploitation in the United States, everyone wants to pretend that a high-tech gloss over a return to Gilded Age-style Robber barons is a “natural evolution.” Tech workers survive in comfort within the last remaining vestiges of benefits that union members fought and died to obtain. The gig economy is just what they called “piecework” a century ago.

You can make all of the correlations to historical trendlines you like but this is a new phenomenon with plenty of benefits to both the customer and workers compared to previous systems, which is why it exists, almost entirely as a result of technology. It's been disruptive and sudden largely due to a complete lack of innovation within existing systems, a possibly inherently feature of previous models. Not driven by some malicious intent of some nerds in California, as the common narratives like to push. That doesn't mean it's not flawed either, all new systems have growing pains.

But more importantly, ignoring how it fits into academic economic history, it's not going away any time soon and we're not going back to an economy where big companies + union model makes sense again merely because our legal/regulatory system was previously designed for that.

They say the political right is the one obsessed with pining for the old days in the US but I see it just as much nostalgia coming from the left. And it does little to help people solve the problems they have today and, likely more so, in the future.

The intentions of “nerds” are entirely irrelevant if the outcome is widespread economic tenuousness.

Sweeping aside history because you’re arriving at the same kind of poverty by novel means is quite the hand wave. No one disagrees that how we address these problems is going to be different from times past, but to pretend that things like class relations are ahistorical defies any notion of reasoned consideration. And especially in an age of such extreme income inequality that the greatest predictor of one’s future wealth is that of their parents.

> The intentions of “nerds” are entirely irrelevant if the outcome is widespread economic tenuousness.

Not if we're talking about history and that's very much the history being written in popular culture.

You specifically said that it's not a "natural evolution" because a similar thing happened in the past during the gilded age. And instead it's some sort of regression back to that?

My entire comment counters that sentiment. The context and motivations are very different this time around, even if some (keyword is some) of the outcomes are similar. And when context and motivation are different then the effective solutions are going to also be very different.

> but to pretend that things like class relations are ahistorical

The typical academic writing where "class relations" are the central worldview tends to push more and more economic control to centralization and socialist ideology.

If I missed an evolution in the solutions offered there (ie, deprioritizing property and tort law in favour of more unions, centralization, agency oversight, laws that only apply to full-time employee, etc), then I'll happily admit I'm wrong to dismiss it as more of the same...

So either you want to cripple the modern industrial evolution, ala Uber in London, to go back to the previous model or your think those same systems will somehow work in the new era. All I'm saying is the previous generations solutions are a poor fix for this problem. And buying into 'working class vs everyone else' worldview and the socialist breadbasket that comes with that, rather than strengthening the individual's ability to not be exploited within the context of a decentralized capitalist system through stronger courts protecting contractors and modernized government services, is a misguided and nostalgic proposition.

This is in large part because the sectors that saw the largest move towards alternative work arrangements—like education and medicine—have a high proportion of women.

Anyone know more about this? What jobs in those areas are becoming contract based?

My little sister is a physical therapist assistant (usually the person actually administering physical therapy), and a lot of her jobs have been contract based.

Ah, I didn't realize those jobs were starting to turn!

Lecturers and nurses, as a guess. I know a CEO of a nursing staffing agency. I imagine she contracts nurses out. In both cases contracts would let businesses treat shift hours as more isolated needs. That grants them lots of flexibility.

A female relative of mine is a occupational therapist (registered). Over the last 15 years, she's had a series of full time jobs in facilities (mostly retirement care) that each eventually converted into contract-based work, mostly as the facilities consolidated into umbrella companies. In each case, the working conditions have deteriorated to the point where she has been driven to find a new job, but the sense I get is that finding non-contractor work in that field at this point is getting asymptotically more difficult (at least in the mid-Atlantic US).

In the time since the end of the article's data was sourced, until now, the U6 rate has fallen from 11% to 8.3% - which is back to where it was in the Summer of 1998. When it gets into the 7.x% levels, the employment market will be the second hottest in roughly 50 years next to the year 2000.

The time frame sourced, includes an U6 rate that reached nearly 18% and a U3 rate that hit 10%. It's not surprising that conventional full-time work numbers would be severely distorted both by the great recession and the recovery period.

The actual labor force reality is the US is facing a severe shortage of labor due to extremely slow population growth (and that assumes a big hit from inbound automation; if that's not as big as forecast, the shortage will be that much worse).

The US added $4.x trillion to its economy in the last ten years (despite the great recession), roughly the size of Germany's economy of 82 million people. It accomplished that while adding only 22 million people. Without a leap in automation, ie productivity gains, there's no way to keep matching that economic expansion in the next 10 and 20 years as population growth slows even further.

If there is a labor shortage then why are the jobs being created of the kind that are less advantageous to workers? Isn’t the market supposed to “correct” in favor of labor in that scenario? Because it looks like the opposite has happened.

>Isn’t the market supposed to “correct” in favor of labor in that scenario?

The purpose of neoliberalism is to ensure that no matter the actual ratio of supply to demand, the price of labor will never rise. Must never rise. The basis of this entire economy is low wages.

I think it depends on the flow of money. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if money is flowing unevenly and most of the population is not getting enough to maintain their consumption, then their consumption will fall reducing the need for employees. For now, many people are still reaching into the future and pulling money into the present by buying with home loans, student loans, and car loans.

But once that is unavailable, and demand starts dropping because they’re not seeing the money come back to them (since it’s easier and easier for it to get funneled to the top), then the market will adjust again. However, you never know when it can stop because governments tend to keep pulling money from the future to pay for things like healthcare and retirement welfare for people who didn't save enough.

My understanding is that QE caused asset inflation which increased the price of land and therefore increased the price of housing. So wage gains have ended up in the hands of landlords.

Hard to believe in a labor shortage when wages haven't gone up much

I wonder if that added productivity comes from the rise of smart phones and being able to be connected all the time?

depends how they fiddle th figure I though 3 or 4 % was the full employment rate

Different stats depending on how you determine that someone is "unemployed". Some count anyone who doesn't have a job at all unemployed, while some will take that number, and remove people who wouldn't be part of the workforce anyway, like retired persons, stay at home parents, and students. And there's a few in between.

I'm no expert but I think the 3/4% is relative to the U3 statistic and and not the U6 statistic mentioned above.

    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate.jsp
    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

You'd think that where workers are easy to fire such as in the US, there would be less incentive to use contractors over employees, than in places with very rigid rules for firing.

Full-time employees have to be provided healthcare and benefits. Contractors do not.

That sure weighs in the other direction. But presumably no contractor or other non-employee would (should) work for less cost to the employer since they still have to fund pensions, healthcare etc?

I'm guessing that the situation is that in some sectors there are people now working as "contractors" for the same type of money they would be making as employees - but without benefits.

So it's a good thing at least that all this translates to fantastic growth which ultimately trickles down... /s

Maybe there is less incentive to use contractors than in a country with really rigid laws, like France say. These data just show that there is still an incentive to use contractors over employees which is very interesting.

This report from GAO[1] published in 2015, referenced in the report, referenced in TFA (whew), is very eye opening and worth a read.

It states very clearly how the economy is changing. Public policy will need to adapt to this new environment. Also, this is just the beginning of a massive shift in work that was predicted as far back as the Regan administration.

1: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-15-168R

Published Dec 2016 ...

That's very recent for economic stats

Ah, right. Good point.

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